You Could Look It Up (69 page)

manual
See
handbook
.

mountweazel
An invented entry in a reference book, giving information on something that does not exist. See chapter 10½.

pharmacopoeia
Greek
φάρμακον
(
pharmakon
) has a disconcerting range of meanings, running from “medicine” to “poison”;
ποιε
ν
(
poiein
) means “to make.” The art of compounding drugs became
pharmacopée
in French in 1571, and by 1618 a book listing approved drugs and how to make them was known as a
pharmacopoeia
or
pharmacopeia
.

reference
The verb
refer
comes from Middle French
referer
or
referir
‘put in connection’, which in turn comes from Latin
re
‘back’ +
ferre
‘bear, carry’. The verb showed up in English in the late fourteenth century and got its meaning of “consult” in 1574. The noun
reference
was used in English from the end of the sixteenth century, and the compound
reference book
from 1771.

table
One of the oldest words in English. Latin
tabula
, its source, had a range of meanings, including a piece of furniture with legs supporting a flat surface and a tablet on which laws were written. It already meant “a systematic arrangement of numbers, words, symbols, etc., in a definite and compact form” in the Old English period, around the year 1000.

thesaurus
Greek
θησαυρός
(
thesauros
) is a treasury or a storehouse—it is the root of
treasure
. It appears in the titles of a number of wordbooks: Thomas Cooper’s Latin–English dictionary of 1565 was titled
Thesaurus linguæ romanæ et britannicæ
and Henri Estienne published
his
Thesaurus linguae graecae
in 1572. It took on new life, and a new meaning, when Peter Mark Roget used it to refer to his thematically organized dictionary in 1852.

union catalog
Latin
unus
‘one’ produced
unio
‘oneness, unity.’ A
union catalog(ue)
brings together the holdings of many libraries into one sequence.

vade mecum
The Latin is simple enough: “come with me.” An easily carried book that promises to guide its reader through complexities.

vocabulary
Latin
vocare
‘to call or name’ gives
vocabulum
‘something called or named’, and a collection of these
vocables
is a
vocabulary
. Today it often means a list of words a beginner is striving to learn, or the total number of words an individual knows, but it is also used as a synonym for
dictionary
or
lexicon
.

volume
Latin
volumen
comes from
volvere
‘to roll’; it recalls the days when books were scrolls. Today
volume
usually refers to a codex. Because there is a practical limit to how many leaves can be bound together, long reference books often fill multiple volumes. A near synonym, and the word used in the Romance languages,
tome
, is from
τόμος
(
tomos
) ‘section of a book’, itself derived from
τέμνειν
(
temnein
) ‘to cut’.

wordbook
The Germanic roots
word
and
book
are both very ancient, but it took until 1598 for John Florio to combine them as
word-book
. In English, says the
OED
, “The term is sometimes used specifically to avoid the implication of completeness or elaboration of treatment characteristic of a dictionary or lexicon.” Dutch
woordboek
and German
Wörterbuch
, though, have no such connotations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To do this properly, I’d have to thank pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in the last half dozen years, since there’s hardly a soul who has escaped my requests for suggestions. But I’ll single out a few for particular thanks: Lauren Avirom, David Azzolina, Celia Barnes, Lisa Berglund, Kevin Berland, Brycchan Carey, Paul Charosh, Elizabeth Denlinger, Jonathan Ellis, Mimi Ezust, Janet Ing Freeman, Cynthia Gibson, Anthony Grafton, Tom Guilbert, Steve Gustafson, Rachel Hadas, Kristine Haugen, Joe Holub, Simon Hornblower, Jacqueline Hylkema, Dale Ireland, Jan Lewis, Tabitha McIntosh, James J. O’Donnell, Ann Peters, John Pollack, Jessica Richard, Rebecca Shapiro, Ammon Shea, Jesse Sheidlower, Peter Sokolowski, Peter Stallybrass, Kory Stamper, Tim Stewart-Winter, John Stone, Christopher Stray, Dan Traister, Sarah Werner, Phil Yeagle, and Ben Zimmer.

My research assistant, Rachel Niemczyk, has been indispensable, helping me collect and organize close to a million words of notes.

As always, it has been a pleasure to work with George Gibson at Bloomsbury, for whom I hope the chapter “Overlong and Overdue” has served to put my own missed deadlines in some kind of perspective.

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